STATEMENT 18 MAY 2013
I graduated as a painted from the Free Art School in Helsinki in 1998. Already as a student I used photography alongside painting in my works. Photography was for me a path for becoming a multidisciplinary artist, and today I work with moving and still images, environmental art, installation, performance and drawing. In addition to cross-disciplinary media, I am also interested in approaches that blend art with science.
My key themes – apart from light and colour, which I investigate almost without noticing – are people and thereby memories, remembering and dreams. My other themes include anonymity, interaction, narrativity, the traditional presentation of male and female roles in art, and the significance of shame in private and public contexts. I am also intrigued by different conceptions of space and the experience and investigation of space, themes I have addressed through traditional media as well as new approaches.
I am particularly fond of seriality and repetition as artistic devices. Installation has also become an increasingly important medium for me. The thing that draws me towards community art and installation is the boundary between staging and reality. My current installations have an affinity with performance and its components, they examine the elements of traditional representation of space and time, up to a point where even the performer becomes superfluous. My photographic and video works are often performative and involve elements of fictive documentation. It is natural for me to appear visually or auditively in my own works.